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25 February 2011

I just got this corp-mail and I thought I would share it because it's a very funny story. Ignore the fact that it's a single sentence, he's foreign and spends way too much time is ECM ships ( I <3 U bro)

earlier in week i mentioned a small private war i was having with a Russian Wormhole Alliance..after killing a few ships i decided i'd like 150million isk as a payment to leave them and their Wormhole in peace.So yeah they refused to pay and during the 5 days i ended up destroying over 1 Billion isk worth of ships and netted myself around 100million in loot..at the cost of 1 Hurricane(o\).So the Russians were pretty pissed..lots of Cyrillic in Local-not much of it complimentary..aaaaaand they really started to log in the numbers so i was fighting 5,6,7 at a time.I decided to leave them alone for 24hours and on making my way back to their system earlier today i noticed that their POS was almost gone..only the Large Gallente Tower remained with <30 minutes til it unanchored.lol..yeah so...a bit of frantic toing and froing saw me get a Badger arranged and waiting logged off in hi-sec when the timer hit<1 minute.In goes the Hurricane to sit right on the tower..the Russian Hauler appears to try scoop it and is 2 volleyed and so i am left with a splendid used Gallente Large Tower to collect-value seems to be about 275 million isk.Total cost to the Russians then...approx 1.3 Billion and they forced out of their "Home"lawlz...all i wanted was 150 and id have been happy.

With a CSM member "quitting EvE" and seemingly endless chatter about the CSM being upset at CCP there is plenty to talk about. Letrange brought up a good point that I thought could use more elaboration here: http://letrangeeve.blogspot.com/2011/02/teadazes-trees.html He mentioned that the CSM are players and that players almost always have one area of concentration, or at least a favorite that they would rather focus on.

I think that critique should be taken a bit further. The CSM requires a huge commitment to getting out there in EvE just to win, not to mention once a player is in office. This isn't a bad thing but it does immediately exclude a certain set of players. What you end up with are a set of CSM members who have historically been representatives of a smaller segment of the population. I'm not sure how this can be helped but a good start would be an in game menu where each candidate has answered an array of questions posed by player (prior to the candidacy period) and where you can vote right in the game. The old voting tool can be kept but this would get many more players voting and perhaps get them voting more accurately for their desires.

As what Consider to be an upper level causal player (meaning more commitment than many casuals but less than many hardcores) here are the things I consider important:

I do think lo-sec sucks; but not for pirates, for everyone. It should be heavily re-worked. Pirates get on a high horse and preach about not boxing in their game play; in the same sentence they ask CCP to box in the game play of others so they can have juicy targets. This is ludicrous. The reason no targets come to lo-sec is because lo-sec inhabitants only destroy, they do not build. If you want to play in the sandbox then don't just kick sand in peoples eyes. There needs to be something that can be built or done by player groups in lo-sec, I'm not sure what, just something. I don't mean more L5's or mining or whatever. Few sane players will risk such expensive ships and all that effort when they can be killed by a pirate in a cheap battlecruiser who just happened to be roaming by.

The CSM shouldn't even be spending so much time talking about lo-sec since no one goes there.

Faction warfare was a neat idea, and one that can still be made great. One thing it needs is more publicity and less spies

Which brings up spies, we need tools for addressing spies. I don't even want to go close to saying that people cannot play EvE any way they want. But I do want to see it be harder to be a spy then just joining up and being in the corp/alliance. Perhaps we could get some tool that allowed us to compare online times (via the corp/buddy list) of a suspected alt spy with his suspected main. This would cost a lot of isk and would still require human research. I'm sure the EvE community would have even further ideas.

Keep jump bridges for crying out loud. It's hard enough to get around 0.0 as it is. Actually owning the systems should make it easier. And yes, I do think the people who live in a space deserve an advantage, welcome to every human conflict ever.

Okay, that's enough bitching. I would also like to say that I love EvE and CCP even though there will always be problems with something so complex.

24 February 2011

There's been a lot of CCP out there lately surrounding incarna and the myriad of issues (good and bad) that accompany it. I will reiterate my belief: I am actually looking forward to incarna and I think it is very cool and exciting, BUT I love my EvE despite the lack of an avatar. So if a game can make me love it even though I can only look at a thumbnail of my character there must be something there, something worth putting more effort into. So really my only grief with incarna is the seemingly massive amount of commitment CCP had to put into it while many other issues were not quite as fully addressed.

So there is my point of view, and now on to the new shinies: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=861 For those of you who enjoy a bit of ratting, especially in null sec space, you will no doubt be excited to read that CCP will be fleshing out the DED sites! Well, I'm excited. Thanks CCP!

This did however get me thinking a bit about two things: 1) bitter vet syndrome and my EvE life and 2) new ships!

I admit I have struggled with B.V.S. at times but not as much as many others. I've found myself a bit disheartened at EvE every so often and spinning my ship because I didn't have the will to go out into space. I usually combat this with a frigate roam in which I lose at least 3 stealth bombers and make everyone laugh. I'll ask Devin to comment more on this for your entertainment later. I've also been lucky enough to find something new just in time to keep me logging in. I will admit that this has slowed down quite a bit since last year and I've been forced to seek much of my new "buzz" from faction ship experimentation and out of game fun such as Somer.Blink and TeamSpeak rages.

That brings me to my next thought: we need new ships. It's clear that a ton of work went into T3 cruisers and I appreciate that. Even though I struggle to "want" one myself I can see the draw of that reconfigurability. I do wish they were a bit more flexible in adapting to their race but that's another issue (for example, the Proteus is very tough to make a good drone boat out of).

One of the things that brought me back to EvE was the new ships being introduced at the time. While the dreads, jump freighters, and altered super carriers have been fun over the years I've always gotten more excited about filling out the general fleets. The T3 was wonderful and gave me a lot of hope for T3 frigate or (gaming gods willing) T3 battleship additions. Now though, it seems that there isn't much hope for new ships on the horizon. I do hope that as Incarna gets further developed CCP will be able to put some more energy back into new ships.

Hunter/Killers - T2 Destroyers designed to do what Destroyers do best: Hunt down submarines...er... Stealth Bombers (maybe depth charges or specialized _on grid only_ scanners that give a general vector but not exact locations)

Flag Ships - A battleship sized command ship, it's appearance on the field means serious business. More defensive than offensive it would have higher than T2 defenses but be more in line with the T1 offensively.

Artillery - T2 Battleships - A natural evolution of the tactical use of "Sniping" in fleet engagements. The Navies would naturally want to take this to the next step. Increased range, increased targeting, greatly increased volley damage. BUT you also have decreased firing rate, greatly decreased defenses, etc. Perhaps these ships would even need to link to each other or "siege" into artillery mode.

18 February 2011

It's been a long time but I've finally re-joined the first Alliance of my EvE career. We've both moved quite a long way from CVA Providence but I'm looking forward to spending a bit of quality time with some very old friends. My new commentator NolDevin was the first to make the move back over to AOV and after taking some time to gather my assets and say my goodbyes to my friends in Dashavatara I followed him.

With the new job I've had a lot less play time but I'm going to be staying home this weekend so it's looking like I might get to have a bit of fun, perhaps even some damn PvP :)

13 February 2011

After over four hours of exchanging Rokh based puns I finally broke down, went to somer.blink and bid on a Rokh. I won that ship and now (imagine that) I would like to strongly support the Rokh +25 drive!

I would love to link the chat log but I doubt anyone wants to read 4 hours of me spouting Rokh puns so I'll try to dig up some favorites:

-get you rokhs off
-rokhy road
-rokhy horror picture show
-rokhy top (for you ppl from Tennessee)
-Hard Rokh Cafe
-rokh and roll never forgets
-welcome to the rokh
-rokh the cazbah

07 February 2011

Hello everybody...
Meatay has recruited me to be the non-drunk half of his blog. We've been flying together for a couple years now and share a lot of the same interests in combat style.

That is... losing expensive ships in giantfailgasms.
No but really, we've been trying to figure out our most successful PVP ships and methods for quite some time. Obviously Gilas aren't one of them, but we do nail some nice kills here and there and are learning.

The learning part, as well as any particularly juicy victories or funny failures, will be my focus here.

05 February 2011

04 February 2011

I know nobody cares but I've been pretty absent of late... I've got a new job and all of the usual catching up and meeting my new team members has kept me busy. This means I won't be able to work from home until I get into the flow of things and that means I won't be playing EvE nearly as much :(

On the EvE front I'm excited to say that I've rounded out my main (meatay) on all cruiser hulls and will be advancing to all races T1 BS after I touch up some supporting skills I've been neglecting. After that I'm thinking I will head towards either command ships or black ops, I really cannot decide, but I have time.